GitHub

My journey…

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018 November Viva

2019

2020 Covid-19

2021

Why did it take so long?

Umm…

  • Git is scary?
    • It’s a foreign language! branch, head, origin, blame, diff, fork?
    • Git is for command line experts?
    • What if I break the repo? and merge conflicts…
  • Why is git useful?
    • Time travel?
  • I’m too busy?
    • I’ve got stuff to do!

Why should you use git / GitHub?

1. Centralized cloud storage of your code

2. Version control system

2. Version control system

  • Keep track of important versions
  • Always have a working version

3. A single point of truth

  • Latest version of code
  • Previous versions of code (with changes)
  • Data
  • Project description
  • Installation instructions
  • Science / notes
  • Discussion / ideas
  • To do list / tasks

4. Reproducible research

  • Makes your code / data available as a single project
  • Makes your code / data citable
  • Track changes
  • Track what went wrong

4. Collaboration

5. Collaboration

Makes it easier to:

  • collaborate
  • share your code
  • improve your code

Makes your project / data / code:

  • easier to find
  • easier to install

6. You might need to learn it eventually anyway

  • Software developer
  • Research software engineer
  • Data science

And more?

  • Automatically test your code
  • Build websites
  • …

Let’s go back to 2014…

GitHub demo

RStudio projects

Why use RStudio projects?

  • Helps keep you organised!!!
  • When you open a project
    • a new R session is loaded
    • the working directory is set to the project directory
    • .RData is loaded
    • .Rhistory is loaded
    • previous tabs are left open
    • other RStudio settings are loaded

Questions?